


hold it down

by remnantof



Series: T/Jverse [6]
Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Alternate Universe, Established Relationship, Familial Abuse, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, POV Second Person, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-19
Updated: 2011-11-19
Packaged: 2017-10-26 07:28:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/280378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remnantof/pseuds/remnantof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You come in from the cold.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hold it down

**Author's Note:**

> second person, tim pov  
> austin, the winter following "what it makes of hate," set a year before the start of a story just_peachy is working on.

Soft murmurs slide up the scale, sharp and urgent by the time you make it to the bed.  The draft you brought in should be fading, but your skin and armor hold the chill, your cape drags it with you.  You won't know, without asking, what specifically woke him: the draft, the scarab, the slip of a cold gauntlet through his hair.  A finger brushing the shell of his ear.  Maybe you've been here so long that there's nothing to it.  You enter a space, Jaime responds.  That sounds nice, better than asking would be, and you have few qualms about lying to yourself.  Pretending.

It works, until it doesn't.  The snow has Austin shut down, still falling into its own blanket.  Even crime sleeps, here.  Even the night mutes and changes for the cold, finds a way to fold into itself and close you out.  The air is so dry, the exposed skin of your face feels brittle, every small fault in the armor that lets you move feels like a cut from the wind.  It's disturbingly quiet outside, not a city the way you know cities: know one city, in every tissue of your body that was killed and grew back, wrong.  This is not your city, and this is not the city you climbed across last night or walked through this afternoon, meeting Jaime for lunch.  It makes your skin itch and the itch clusters at the base of your skull, runs through your teeth: but you can't find a reason to stay out.  Not when the quiet makes so much sense right here, the building trying to settle at a new extreme, Jaime unsettling in the bed, the space heater only reminiscent of traffic by a long stretch of your imagination, pulling dry air over hot coils.

Your cape isn't heavier for being frozen.  It weighs the same as it did last night, and the night before: you aren't carrying it as well tonight.  Aren't, can't?  Another question to not ask.  Jaime rolls over, onto his back and to the edge of the bed, an arm hanging in space and fighting gravity, just the shine of his eyes to show them open.  Then the flash of his blinking, the arm falls over his stomach and pulls his shirt down.  "You should get that off," he groans, "you're making it colder in here."  The cape barely moves with you, you're barely moving: but it's enough, to hold and drag the cold air.  You tilt your elbows to pull your hands under, let it close around you, and maybe it does get worse, or watching Jaime shiver and roll away pulls the pin at the back of your skull, breaks some dam in your nerves that had taken you past cold to numb.  Your hands feel sloppy on the belt, and the first shiver hits hard, makes you clench your teeth against a tic that overwhelms like a sneeze.  Denied, it shakes through you, and you do sneeze.

Jaime laughs, smooths his hands over his shirt while sitting up, his silhouette strange from his mussed hair, the way the shirt hangs.  You're even smaller than he is: where did something that big come from?

Questions, shivers clustered in your brain stem, striking through the absence of this night.  The hollow space yawning through the city, when night is supposed to be--loud, full, alive.  Not always in a good way, but.  Snow never stopped anything in Gotham.  You never stopped anything in Gotham, if you're honest.

If you're not pretending, tonight.  "I wish I'd recorded that," Jaime yawns, smiling and shifting to sit on the bed with his knees grazing the cape.  "Dark terror of the night, sneezing."  Another laugh sighs out: your smirk is hard and crooked, feels wrong on your face.  Or your face just feels wrong, trying to thaw out and keep from shaking, clenching your teeth and letting Jaime laugh like.  Like you feel part of it, at all.  Your hands slip on each other and miss the edge of the gauntlets, over and over.  "Tim?"  Jaime looks at your face, your set jaw, then down, to the shift of the cape around your shaking hands.   “¿Estás bien?"

Why is this embarrassing?  You push your whole body to stillness, the one thing--that you didn't learn and won't give up, your stillness is what you _own_ \--with your hands against your thighs.  Like you've been caught with your tights down, you need to pull them back up, tuck your head and act like it never happened.  "I--" you start, but opening your mouth is a concession, starts the shaking under the control and that's so subtle it hurts.  

You drag the dry air through your teeth.  "I need ss-some help," you admit, grimacing at the slip of your voice in your own mouth.  Jaime doesn't laugh anymore: dark terror of the night, stuttering.  Just tugs you down by the cape until you're hovering, close enough for warm fingers to push the cowl up.  "You're freezing," he says, and the tone is oddly--happy.  His fingers card through your hair, damp with sweat and thaw.  On the left, his silhouette smooths; part of his face cracks and stands out darker than the rest, before he's staring at you through an orange lens.  Looking through your armor for traps and triggers, finding the true catch that lets him slide the weight from your shoulders.  You swallow, want it back to wrap yourself in.  Your hands lift, incompleting gestures between you, leave something for Jaime to catch.  Catch them, squint for the seam on his arm and peel one away, then the other.  The seam switches sides, more false openings you can understand, but--there's something pointless to it too.  If I die out there, you want to say--to Bruce, never.  Never to Jaime--I want them to fingerprint me.  I want someone to know.

Plenty of people would know either way.  Jaime's orange eye guides his hand over the belts, pressing there, armor sliding over his fingers to pick the catch there.  Every piece drops to the floor, and there's something--

It's shockingly intimate, even now.  A pile that means something, enough that you brace your hands and force them through the motions, pull the tunic open on your own.  Stripped down to a tee and tights, and your heavy boots rooting you to the floor.  With your neck exposed, the chill hits again, raises gooseflesh all over your arms in a fast prickle that you follow it with your hands, your fingers so cold, it stands out on the rest of your skin.  "Pobresito," Jaime murmurs, rubbing up to the elbow and pulling you closer.  "Why did you even go out there?"

"It doesn't," you bite and hiss the words, like they can be nibbled down to casualty, "usually bother me."  From the other end: your throat closes and you drag the stillness back, stop shaking under his hands and flatten your mouth in its usual line.  This armor has more false seams and trick catches than the Batsuit.  Than the suit you wear into fucking deep space.  And it's just as beyond your hands right now, your memory.  You don't know where the weak points are anymore, until something stabs you through them.  "Bullshit," he laughs, and something under your bottom rib caves in, leaks.

"Jaime--" this is old too, or instinctive, or nurtured.  You know too many languages by now, to not have the right words, to not know yourself, be capable of explaining this person that.  That your body just carries around.  Someone heavy and clumsy and with a tongue the wrong size for this mouth.  With your face full of needles as it wakes up, your runny nose.  Are you the body or the person, are you the armor or whatever, if anything, moves underneath?  And the puncture, the leak, is that blood or air or the Gotham river?

It's a figurative leak.  It doesn't really matter how you build the picture: maudlin by degrees, dramatic from angles.  It's in your head and it's stuck there and it doesn't help because--

"Tim?"

you're standing there and it's quiet and you're probably going fucking crazy.  "I don't, I--"

"Tim."

"I don't like--I don't leave things _unfinished_."

"You can take the night off, Tim.  You can.  You don't have to go out _every_ night, especially if it's snowing."  The orange eye flattens and slides sideways, into the hollow of his face, and when the armor is gone his hair is still flat on that side.  There are no seams in that armor, no weak points left for mobility, or whatever it is other people find so compelling about human error.  It's as organic as it is technological.  It's literal, but inseparable: if he touches you with it, nothing about that rings false.  Nothing about it is less-than.

Bruce is like that, in a way.  You...want to be.  You want it to mean more when you snort and look back at the window.  "It's just snow."  

Less is more, right?  How many different ways can you pick _that_ phrase apart before

he snaps, "YOU'RE COLD," and you're both shaken, but only you are shaking.  "I'm sorry, but you don't have to _do_  
this, and I just wish you would act like--like you know that."

"I know that.”  A flatness that wants to slope toward petulance, just to be something.  Do something, why aren’t you doing _something_?  The night is inside-out hollow and quiet, the night is cold and muffled, trying to breathe through a cloth, but you don’t have to be.  

You are not, actually, the night, or the city your body finds itself in.  Let it drag this person, you, _whatever_ , let it drag it all somewhere _nice_ for a change.  It got you this far.  “I came home,” you try, and rougher is better, looking down is better, reaching for his head in the dark, even out the shadow with your fingers through his flattened hair.  “I came back.”  The rest you can’t explain, the rest doesn’t matter.  Your feelings and your personhood are essentially baggage by now, when actions are what matter, and tonight, they need to let you act.  Breathe them away, shiver until they shake off, that--doesn’t work, but it makes Jaime put his arms around your waist and hold on until you climb into his lap.  Leather and nomex flexing with your legs, rubbing cool against--sweatpants.  You laugh: your body makes that sound and the rest wonders why.  Sweatpants...aren’t a Jaime-specific thing.  Or space heaters, or warm apartments on winter nights, where someone sleeps.  These are not traits.  They do not make you fond--

but they do, but they _do_.  

God, stop _laughing_.

“Are you--”

“I’m cold,” you say, like it’s an epiphany, the kind of epiphany the average person has.  I’m cold and I am losing my fucking mind over sweatpants.  I want, I want to wear sweatpants at night and turn on a heater and go to sleep.  I want to say these words out loud and you want him to hear them and know them and maybe he could stare the enormity of them right back at you, so you don’t feel so _fucking crazy_ , and yes, crazy is a Tim-specific thing.  Nomex tights are a Tim-specific thing, and cold cities, and stillness, and wanting to cry or scream, and kissing some hapless normal person instead.  

Do I taste sour with this?  Do I taste like anything at all?  Who is this shirt from?  What am I doing?

What are you doing?

“Tim?”

“I’m cold.  I’m just cold.”  You take his hand, guide it to the back of your head and line up your faces, like your body can drag both of you around, into this, through it.  Hold my body like this, you’ll move it every way you know, every way you were taught and why

why don’t you own this too, you _paid_ for it.  What if everyone is a body carrying the baggage around, what if only the actions mattered and you reduced your family down to instances of successful and unsuccessful violence?  Or, just violence, no matter the purpose or the  _mission_ , the driving force.  You have spent so much time learning that baggage, how to read bodies to know their intentions, to know people by more than their actions--

You _understand_ these people.  You--used to--understand yourself.  “Jaime, I can’t--” say it out loud, look at Bruce or Jason or Shiva and just see bodies in motion, hitting-training-stabbing.  But they died, but they came back, but they  _lost_.  But you were taught and you paid and you own what your body does, and it’s the same?  You were always like this, you were _always_ like this, chasing them over rooftops in rain or hail or snow to stave off sleep.  You didn’t ask, but you didn’t say no.  His hands don’t need your direction now, to hold you in place, shift and rub the cold from your arms and kiss the neutral places: eyes and cheeks, your wrist, briefly.  

What if you say it now?  “I can’t--”

“Can’t what?”  This has happened before, he asked that--when did he ask that?  Were you even awake?  “Tim?”  He’s so calm, he’s so warm, but

no, _trying_ to be calm.  “Tim, I can’t follow what you’re saying if you don’t say it.”  Tim, you’re scaring me.  Tim, you’re crazy.  How are you finally cluing in?  “Just breathe, okay, just--”

breathe, how many ways do you know--you could drop the baggage and just be a body on him, on the bed, leave yourself in a warm place _and_ go running over the rooftops.  No footprints in the snow, no sound in the city.  What if that was all you had ever done, what if Jason had lived, what if all they ever taught you was the flying, the moving, for its own sake?  You loved that.  You _love_ that.  

You have always been like this.  There is no what-if, there is you, three years old, watching another boy fly.  There is you, twenty years later, realizing--that was the point.  As much as the people who fell.  

“I’m just so tired.”  A complete sentence that isn’t a complete thought, not _the_ complete thought.  It’s nothing new, you can see the twitch where Jaime’s face wants to twist.  Wring itself out of patience and let go.  You’re tired and he’s tired of hearing it, like it’s the beginning and the end of anything instead of the middle.  You’re tired, and?  Don’t you ever ask yourself why, and keep asking, building a network of right and wrong questions that will, given two points and enough time, find and eliminate every route to the most efficient answer?

No.  It’s not that kind of maze, the answer is already there in the center and being tired is what makes you dance around it.  This is not about the journey and you can get this wrong.  Networks and mazes are _P. polycephalum_ and when it runs out of energy, when it can’t solve the problem, it desiccates and hardens.  Lies dormant until conditions improve.  There are a lot of ways to apply that here, you think, but this is different.  Trying to think and feel your way through this.  They don’t always have anything to do with each other.

“What are you thinking about,” Jaime leads, pulling it all together.  The answer is not _Physarum Experiment No. 12_ , or anthropomorphising mold, or a metaphor about trying to link up factual knowledge with what you _know_ , or what you’re realizing.  The answer isn’t even that you’re crazy, because you will not say that out loud.  You will not sit in this bed with him and watch his face trying to assimilate you and that word and the truth of it without making you feel, somehow, worse.  

At least you’re not cold anymore.

“I don’t want to do this.”  His mouth drops just open, that’s just concern, and you go back over everything before going forward: you have to keep going, finish the sentences and the thoughts.  “I don’t want to patrol tonight,” and of course your voice breaks, of course you have to sound like a child and feel like one to get the words out.  “I want--”

to stay home with your boyfriend and sleep and just be a normal person who doesn’t see snow falling and think it’s a perfect night to run across rooftops and swing through the air in red and black body armor.  Most of that makes it all the way out, enough that Jaime laughs, then apologizes for laughing.  Enough that he kisses you and pushes your cowl-hair around with his hands, and it doesn’t make sense but he’s smiling, and that’s good.  He’s all affection, all warmth, putting the blanket around you so you have something to hide yourself with, even if he’s right there.  “You don’t have to, you can do all of that.  Any time you want Tim, it’s fine.  You’re fine.  You came home and everything is fine.”

Most nights are crystallized, if clouded, by the blur of your dreams.  The rest of tonight is just a blur: you let go and lose track, stop trying to hold every moment and turn it over, assign meaning to it and understand that meaning on a greater scale.  Not everything is a case to be worked.  Sometimes it’s just your life.  You might cry or you might be too dried out from the heater.  You might babble in the bath once the hot water warms up the pipes, trying to explain what you’ve figured out, or you might sit mute and tired while Jaime scrubs shampoo through your hair.  You think he asked to vaporize your cowl but you’re not sure you ever answered, if it needed an answer, what the answer would be.  

The details get lost in sleep.  Jaime’s smile, toweling your hair dry, rushing from the warm bathroom to the warm bed.  “Classes are cancelled” and his kisses that don’t ask, but receive, when you feel enough like a human being to slide against him under the comforter and find, well, comfort.

But you know there is sleep, after it all, and that’s enough.

-

Nine am is bright and clear.  After everything, you’re the first one awake and you pulled a chair over to the window to look out at the city and drink your coffee.  The landlord is outside trying to clean up the curb with a metal shovel; you entertain the idea of going downstairs and offering to help, but there’s no urgency.  

Jaime shuffles across the apartment from the bed and leans on the wall next to you, looking out over your head and lifting a hand to your shoulder.  His thumb digs in and moves, blurring lines of camaraderie and intimacy with short circles.  You hand up the rest of your coffee and lean against the window as he spares it a look before finishing it.  “Are you going out there tonight?”

The shadowed parts of your face reflect back at you, eyelashes touching eyelashes.  Part of you is already out there, seventeen-hundred miles away.  “I don’t know.”

“Are you okay with that,” he asks, and you only have to shift your eyes up to see one side of his mouth turn down.

He doesn’t need you to be okay, but.  There are wrong answers.  “Yeah,” you say, turning out of the seat to go pick your armor off the floor.


End file.
